Clerk is the best drop-in for React.

Stay on Clerk if …

Being straight about where they're the better call.

The four moments you outgrow Clerk

Every Clerk customer who moves to WeldForge tells us it was one of these.

Pricing at common MAU tiers

Clerk's free tier is genuinely generous, and it got more so. Re-checked against clerk.com/pricing on 14 September 2026: the included allowance is now 50,000 monthly retained users, not the 10,000 an earlier version of this page compared against. Clerk wins on price outright up to that line, and this table has been corrected to say so.

Note the unit. Clerk bills MRU — a user who returns at least one day after signing up — not MAU. For an app with heavy one-visit signups, MRU is the smaller number, so Clerk is cheaper than a like-for-like MAU reading suggests.

Feature-for-feature

The short version: Clerk's strength is the pre-built React UI and their generous free tier. WeldForge's strength is backend-identity breadth — every protocol enterprise buyers ask for is in the base paid tier, plus a self-host path and ZA residency.

Migrating from Clerk

Clerk's export API makes user migration straightforward; the bigger lift is replacing the React components.

Step 1 — Export users from Clerk

curl https://api.clerk.com/v1/users?limit=500 \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer $CLERK_SECRET_KEY" \
    > clerk-users.json

Clerk exports email, phone, external IDs, metadata and hashed passwords (bcrypt / scrypt). WeldForge accepts these natively.

Step 2 — Export organisations and memberships

If you use Clerk Organisations, export them with the members endpoint:

curl https://api.clerk.com/v1/organizations \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer $CLERK_SECRET_KEY" \
    > clerk-organisations.json

Step 3 — Import into WeldForge

curl -X POST $HOST/api/admin/migrate/clerk \
    -H "x-app-authorization: $TOKEN" \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    --data-binary @clerk-users.json

Clerk organisations map to WeldForge tenants or to a single tenant's SCIM groups — you choose during import based on your B2B model.

Step 4 — Swap the React integration

This is the part that differs from the Keycloak / Auth0 / FusionAuth migrations: Clerk's SDKs deeply integrate React rendering. Replacing <SignIn /> with a bring-your-own-UI OIDC flow is real work — typically 2–5 days for a mature app. The tradeoff is you no longer have vendor-specific components in your tree.

// Before (Clerk)
import { SignIn } from '@clerk/nextjs';
export default function Page() { return <SignIn />; }

// After (standard OIDC, e.g. next-auth or oidc-client-ts)
// Redirect to /t/acme/oauth2/authorize?client_id=... on click.

FAQ

Why would I give up Clerk's React components?

Because they're a lock-in surface. Clerk components assume Clerk's session model, Clerk's user shape, Clerk's organisations API. If you want portability or you're tired of a vendor-shaped hole in your React tree, you build a lightweight sign-in yourself on top of standard OIDC.

Does WeldForge have pre-built components?

Not React-branded ones, no. We intentionally stop at the protocol boundary — `oidc-client-ts`, `next-auth`, `@auth0/auth0-react` and every other OIDC client library works against WeldForge out of the box. You own the UI.

Is Clerk really cheaper below 30k MAU?

Yes, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. Their included allowance — 50 000 monthly retained users as of September 2026 — is unusually generous, and above it the $25 base plus $0.02 per user is structurally cheaper than our Cloud Team $149 plus $0.025. On hosted price alone Clerk stays ahead until roughly 250 000 users. The reasons to choose WeldForge before then are not price: enterprise SAML and SCIM without a per-connection fee, self-hosting for data residency, and a per-tenant SAML IdP. If none of those apply to you, Clerk is a good answer and we would rather you heard that here than found it out after migrating.

What about Clerk Organisations?

Clerk Organisations map to WeldForge's tenants (one-to-one) or to SCIM groups inside a single tenant, depending on your B2B shape. The migration tool will ask.

Will Clerk's passkey credentials carry over?

WebAuthn credentials are tied to the relying party. Passkeys registered against Clerk cannot be re-used against WeldForge — users will re-enrol on first login. Not a blocker; a one-time friction point.